Associate Professor,
In today's highly competitive healthcare environment, hospitals increasingly recognize the need to focus on service quality as a means to improve their competitive position. Patients’ expectations and perceptions of health care service quality as a result play a vital role when selecting a hospital. One of the principal concerns in Indian health care sector, centred on the issue of patient satisfaction. This paper attempts to conduct the gap analysis among patients’ expectations and perceptions of health care service quality by means of a generic, internationally applied market research technique called SERVQUAL.
Service Quality, Patient Satisfaction, Health Care Sector, Patient Expectation, Patient Perception